Justin Goodbread

Call Directions Website

Justin Goodbread Scaled an RIA from 0 to 8 figures in 49 months. Exited on my terms. 7 businesses built and sold. Showing financial advisors how to build a practice worth owning.

Investopedia Top 100 (5x). Author of Your Baby's Ugly & The Ultimate Sale Justin Goodbread built his RIA from zero to an eight-figure valuation in 49 months, then exited on his terms. He has built and sold seven businesses and scaled a national firm to nine figures. Today he coaches financial advisors through Relentless Value Coaching, teaching them how to break through the million-dollar revenue ceiling and build a practice that runs without them. Most advisors he works with are earning between $360K and a million dollars in revenue. They close well. Their pipeline runs on hope instead of structure, and the growth in their revenue stays flat no matter how many networking events they attend or how relentlessly they follow up with every lead. Justin knows that feeling because he lived it. Today he manages over $1 million in revenue while working one day a month. His advisors get results. One took 18 days, completely unplugged and came back to a business that grew while he was gone. Another said his team now reflexively looks to the SOP instead of asking him, freeing him to lead and rainmake instead of manage. Another cut employee attrition to 55% in a year where the industry average was closer to 200%. He has coached hundreds of business owners and the pattern is the same: when advisors stop playing prospect roulette and start executing a real system, things change fast. Justin's books Your Baby's Ugly and The Ultimate Sale have sold over a million copies worldwide. Investopedia named him to their Top 100 Financial Advisors list five times. He was named the 2022 Peter Christman Exit Planner of the Year and inducted into the Exit Planning Institute Hall of Fame. His insights have been featured in Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, Kiplinger, and USA Today. He has shared stages with Gino Wickman, Mark Randolph, and Benjamin Hardy, and hosts a Top 1% podcast. Justin grew up on a dirt road in Brunswick, Georgia. He still believes faith, family, and service matter more than revenue. Whether he's coaching advisors, bowhunting, or mentoring teens, the work is the same: build something worth owning and a life worth living. If you're a financial advisor stuck under a million dollars in revenue, join one of the monthly workshops at www.justingoodbread.com/freecall

10/15/2026

I spent 5 years watching my own P&L bounce like a ball off a hardwood floor.

Up a little, down a little, up a little, down a little. Every bounce felt like progress until I lined the years up next to each other and realized the ceiling had not moved.

I kept blaming the tactic and chasing the next marketing angle, the next hire, the next service line, the next process rebuild. The honest answer was that I already knew what to do. I was just not doing it because the practice was comfortable enough that the pain of changing felt worse than the pain of staying.

Comfortable is the slowest kind of expensive. You do not notice what it is taking from you until you look back and count the years that look the same.

What is the move on your notepad from 6 months ago that is still waiting on you?

Watch the full episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_mMwklUn2o

Eric told me his post-workshop fuel was travel and new golf equipment, and most people would miss why that matters.In ou...
10/14/2026

Eric told me his post-workshop fuel was travel and new golf equipment, and most people would miss why that matters.

In our Million Dollar Advisor program, the coaching room for financial advisors building toward seven figures in revenue, we open every group session the same way. We share wins first, then lessons, then obstacles, and then the next best move.

When a financial advisor drops his wins in the chat and then names what is pulling him forward on the other side of the next season, something clicks. He stops treating growth like punishment and starts treating it like the price of admission to a life he actually wants.

Eric named the trip, the clubs, and the funnel, and all 3 belong on the same page.

A practice built without a reward on the other side of the push is a practice you will quietly resent by year 3. I have watched it happen too many times to count.

What is the reward you have already earned but have not yet booked?

A coaching client told me on a call last month that his real problem was ex*****on.He had plenty of good ideas. He just ...
10/14/2026

A coaching client told me on a call last month that his real problem was ex*****on.

He had plenty of good ideas. He just could not get them from the whiteboard into the practice in a way that actually stuck.

I pushed back on him a little. Ex*****on is almost never the first problem. It is usually the second or third one wearing the costume of the first.

We went back to the foundation and the examination. We looked at vision, mission, and values, then the real valuation of the practice and the wealth gap. We walked through the 10 KPIs that actually matter for a financial advisor, and the avatar, named with enough precision that his team could spot one walking in the door.

By the time we got to the 90 day sprint, the plan almost wrote itself, because now he knew exactly what the sprint was pointed at. The ex*****on problem quietly disappeared, because the real problem was that he had been trying to execute on a target he had never measured.

When I was scaling my RIA I produced volume aimed at everyone and no one in particular. It worked. It cost me years I do...
10/14/2026

When I was scaling my RIA I produced volume aimed at everyone and no one in particular. It worked. It cost me years I do not get back.

Frank R. just showed what the other way looks like.

He shipped 20 pieces of content in 4 weeks inside his own practice — four YouTube videos and sixteen LinkedIn posts, all aimed at the one client he built his firm to serve. He did not hire a team. He walked into a process that pulls content out of the practice he is already running, in his own voice, on a schedule he can actually keep.

One of the questions I get most from financial advisors is whether it is actually possible to produce a month of quality content in a couple of hours. Frank just answered it.

When was the last time you sat down and named the one person your content is actually for?

I used to think the discovery meeting was where I won the client.So I showed up ready to perform. Whiteboard, talking po...
10/14/2026

I used to think the discovery meeting was where I won the client.

So I showed up ready to perform. Whiteboard, talking points, credentials, the full dog and pony show. I would walk out of a good one feeling like I had earned it, and walk out of a bad one wondering what I had missed.

My coach years ago taught me to flip the whole thing on its head. Take everything you would normally do inside the meeting and deliver it to the prospect, in small chunks, before the meeting ever starts.

At first that felt like I was giving away my chance to sell. In practice, it did the opposite. The prospects who were never going to hire me quietly opted themselves out before I spent an hour with them. The ones who sat down had already seen the process, the fees, the tools, and the path, and the only thing left to decide was whether I could actually help them.

When you stop trying to win them over in the room, you stop praying over the calendar the night before.

10/14/2026

I spent a lot of time handing financial advisors the right tactic, and watching almost none of them use it.

A guy would call me asking how to grow his revenue. I would walk him through the exact move. He would say it made amazing sense, we would hang up, and the next time we talked we were having the same conversation about the same problem.

It took me longer than I would like to admit to realize the tactic was never the issue. The guy already had good ones written down from the last conference he attended.

Now I ask the question first: what have you already tried?

That one question tells me whether he actually needs new information or whether he needs someone to hold his feet to the fire on the information he already has. Most of the time it is the second one. Ex*****on is quiet, and nobody claps for it until the number on the board changes.

What is sitting in your notes right now that you already know works, and have not run?

Watch the full episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_mMwklUn2o

Emily and I were talking one night about the difference between a business that owns you and a business you actually own...
10/14/2026

Emily and I were talking one night about the difference between a business that owns you and a business you actually own, and it came down to one question.

What did the last dollar you put back into the practice actually earn you, measured in real return rather than in feelings or in how busy the office felt that quarter?

Robert M., one of the financial advisors we work with, said his biggest win was being able to invest in the business while maintaining his target financials and growth metrics. Most financial advisors either grow and blow up the P&L, or they protect the P&L and stop growing, so doing both at once is not luck. It is a process he runs before the money ever leaves the account.

Your practice is the biggest holding on your balance sheet, so manage it like one.

Before I ever had my CFP, I was the top financial advisor of the year at a national firm.I had made over half a million ...
10/13/2026

Before I ever had my CFP, I was the top financial advisor of the year at a national firm.

I had made over half a million dollars in a year. I had built a best-in-class practice. No designations behind my name at all.

I eventually earned the CFP because the board changed the rules and I wanted the mark. I went through University of Phoenix online, knocked out my undergrad in about 12 to 18 months, and got it done. Years later I earned my CEPA because a client walked in with a problem I did not know how to solve.

Both were useful, but neither one was what built the practice.

The practice got built when I stopped treating the next credential like the missing piece and started making the hard decisions I had been avoiding. That meant deciding who to hire and who to release, what to stop offering, and what to stop doing myself.

Education without application leads to stagnation. That is the whole sermon.

What decision are you studying your way around right now?

A financial advisor at a conference last week told me he does not have to market because all of his clients come from re...
10/13/2026

A financial advisor at a conference last week told me he does not have to market because all of his clients come from referrals, and he said it like it was a flex.

I used to say the exact same thing when I was running my RIA, and I believed it right up until the referrals slowed down and I had no idea what to do next.

Referrals are the backup plan we treat as the main plan because we never built a main plan. 80% of financial advisors sit stuck at the same revenue ceiling for exactly that reason. The practice grows when the phone rings and it stalls when the phone goes quiet, and the owner has no lever he can personally pull to change the weather.

The shift is boring to say and hard to build. You engineer the process in front of the first meeting so a right-fit prospect self-diagnoses, sees the transformation, and walks in already sold, which is how you stop hoping and start knowing the number.

If your referrals stopped tomorrow, how would next quarter actually look?

10/12/2026

My trainer said something this week that landed harder than she probably intended.

I had told her about my Alaska hunting trip, about a chair I physically could not stand up out of, and about 6 grown men laughing while grandpa struggled. She did not offer sympathy, she built a plan instead.

Three quarter squats, reps, and conditioning. Her exact words were that we would put in the reps and change the outcome the next time a chair like that showed up in my life.

I have been thinking about that all week.

The reason most people never reach the top 1% of anything is not talent, not opportunity, not timing. It is the willingness to do the boring, repetitive, unglamorous conditioning that the 99% will not touch. The reps happen in a quiet gym on a Tuesday morning when nobody is watching and nobody is clapping. That is exactly why they work.

The next chair is coming. What are you doing this week to make sure it does not win?

Watch the full episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teVWY38YXKQ

Address

Knoxville, TN
37922

Telephone

+18656901155

Website

,

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Justin Goodbread posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Shortcuts

Share